Do you want this sentence to tell you the straight facts about the next play coming up at TheaterWorks, or do you want it to excite you by adding a bit of creative license? Could it do both?
“Lifespan of a Fact” — at TheaterWorks newly renovated Pearl Street space Jan. 30 through March 8 — presents a lively battle between a journalist and a fact checker, with an editor caught in the middle.
The play, by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell and Gordon Farrell, is based on a real situation chronicled in a book by those who lived it, John D’Agata and Jim Fingal. In 2003, D’Agata wrote an article titled “What Happens There” about teen suicide, centering on a specific death in Las Vegas and how the tourism industry may influence how that city deals with the high suicide rate there.
D’Agata adds his own insights to his research and reporting, including things he learned working at a suicide hotline. He sees himself as an essayist rather than a reporter, and his writing veers into poetry, fiction and stream-of-consciousness.
“What Happens There” was written in 2003 about an incident that happened in 2002. Harper’s magazine, which had commissioned the story, ultimately decided not to publish it, due in part to D’Agata’s creative style but also because they found it contained factual inaccuracies. The article found its way to the literature/modern culture journal The Believer, which published it in 2010.
So what happened to “What Happens There” between 2003 and 2010? The piece was being exhaustively fact-checked by Jim Fingal, who was an intern at The Believer when he began the project. The back-and-forth between D’Agata and Fingal could fill a book, and indeed it did. That book, “Lifespan of a Fact,” published the text of D’Agata’s essay alongside Fingal’s voluminous red-pencil notes.
When “Lifespan of a Fact” was turned into a play, it only deepened the book’s debate about how to best represent something that actually happened so that the event takes on greater importance and meaning.
D’Agata and Fingal are characters in the play, which, like the article that inspired the book, takes great liberties with facts. The seven-year fact-checking battle is distilled into five days, the magazine in the play is made up, and so is a sort of referee character, an editor named Emily Penrose. The playwrights consciously mine the manuscript-based story for high comedy and physical confrontations.
TheaterWorks is doing “The Lifespan of a Fact” with some familiar faces onstage and behind-the-scenes:
Jim the fact checker is played by Nick LaMedica, who was possessed by an evil puppet in “Hand to God” at TheaterWorks in 2018.
Tasha Lawrence, who plays Emily the editor, is played Nora of “A Doll’s House, Part 2” at TheaterWorks a year ago.
The TheaterWorks newbie in the cast is Rufus Collins, who plays the writer John D’Agata. His Connecticut credits include “The Old Masters” at the Long Wharf Theatre in 2011 and “My Fair Lady” (as Henry Higgins) and “Gypsy” at the Sharon Playhouse a few seasons ago.
Director Tracy Brigden returns to TheaterWorks, where she helmed popular productions of two savage comedies, “Midsummer” and “Hand to God.” Brigden is also known hereabouts as a former associate artistic director at Hartford Stage, who left that theater in 2001 to become the artistic director of City Theatre Company, which she led for 16 years. Brigden has recently moved back to Connecticut.
Brigden explains that she and TheaterWorks’ Artistic Director Rob Ruggiero “have had a long artistic relationship, recommending different plays to each other. He had some corners in this season he was looking to fill.”
Brigden says that “Lifespan of a Fact,” which had a notable Broadway production in 2018 starring Daniel Radcliffe and now is being staged at regional theaters around the country, feels “increasingly topical as we go down this merry road we’re on in Washington. It’s of the moment.”
While LaMedica was off filming a promotional video for the play, Brigden, Collins and Lawrence sat down with The Courant for a wide-ranging talk about truth, factual accuracy and theater.
For one thing, they can’t help seeing similarities between how writers tell a story and how actors and directors create theater, often by streamlining it and making it more attractive or accessible.
Brigden has a special perspective: Her mother was an editor at Mademoiselle magazine in the 1950s and ’60s.
“It was one of the professions women could be powerful in,” she recalls.
“We all know each other from different walks of different lives,” Brigden says of the cast. “The guys are masterful at shifting the tone of the play when it needs to be different. They’re so good at mining the characters, mining the humor, mining the truth.”
For Lawrence, it’s very much about “how the balance shifts, these changing relationships and behavior of these characters.”
Collins sees characters who are extremely articulate but come to realize their limitations.
“We’re are great at talking words. We live day to day verbally. But what’s at stake here is a suicide. It quiets these hyperverbal people down.”
Rufus’ character has some really beautiful speeches,” Lawrence says, “about what his philosophy is and why this story matters to him. The stakes are high for him.”
“Passionate people in a battle,” Brigden says, “can be both very funny and very moving. Audiences are on the edge of their seats waiting to find out who will win the battle of whether this essay will be published.”
The audience is also asked to make its own determinations about what feels “true” in the play.
“There are a couple of mysteries where the audience will just decide what they think, where they’ll have opinions based on their own lives,” Brigden says. “I had some questions for the playwrights about this, and in some cases they said there were no right answers.”
THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT runs Jan. 30 through March 8 at TheaterWorks Hartford, 233 Pearl St., Hartford. Performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. There is no 2:30 show on Feb. 1. Tickets are $45 to $70. Free student rush tickets available one hour before showtime to students in any Hartford Consortium schools. 860-527-7838, twhartford.org.
